Dorm Champions

I swear, one day I will take photographs again.

Days passed, strange and delicious. The fall weather came and the skies were a high blue like mountain skies, deep and translucent. I began staying in town on the weekends more, and when Sherri came up, I showed her the town. It wasn't like any other town I'd been to. No, she agreed, this was magic. And so I had that now and I had a girl on weekends and I had friends.

Mick and I played basketball for the dorm league with great success. We were ringers, of course. We didn't live in the dorm. Only one fellow did, and that was JR. He had signed us up and we played as these other fellows we had never met which made it hard, somehow, to keep the names straight. The more we won, though, the more suspicious the other teams became. After one game, a player from the team we had just beaten came over and asked who was who. I had been calling Mick Mick all game. "Which player is he?" the fellow wanted to know. Mick and I looked at one another trying to remember what he was supposed to be called. Mick said a name, and the player from the other team asked, "Who's Mick?" "Oh, that's just a nickname," I tried to explain, and quickly, Mick and I both headed for the side door. "Shit, we're going to get caught," I said. Mick just grinned.

We made it to the finals of the dorm league that season. We had the better team and won, but there was no time to celebrate. The boys from the dorm we were playing for had come to see the game. There were probably fifty people there in all. I met the fellow who I was playing for, a soft, doughy looking boy with greasy long hair. He looked like the sort who read science fiction novels every day, but he was a nice guy and got a real kick out of having a part in his dorm team doing so well.

The other team, however, seemed to be onto us and didn't like losing at all to a bunch of hippies, so as soon as the buzzer went off, Mick and I ran straight off the court and headed for the door. We could hear voices calling after us as we hit the cool night air, but we didn't stop or turn around. The moon was up and the night was bright. We were Dorm Champs for the entire University.

Sort of.

The next day, JR told us that it had gotten a little crazy after we left. The other team was trying to verify who was who, but everyone sort of mumbled and pointed and drifted off. He said one fellow was really hot. It seems he knew someone who lived in the dorm, and he was grabbing people and yelling, and JR said he thought the guy was going to hit someone. But everyone started drifting off and the fellow's teammates were trying to calm him down. JR thought it was all pretty funny.

It felt good being champs.